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Ars Technica has a great breakdown of the codec debate for the HTML 5 video element. Support for the new video element seems to be split into two main camps, Ogg Theora and H.264, and the inability to find a solution has HTML 5 spec editor Ian Hickson throwing in the towel. "Hickson outlined the positions of each major browser vendor and explained how the present impasse will influence the HTML 5 standard. Apple and Google favor H.264 while Mozilla and Opera favor Ogg Theora. Google intends to ship its browser with support for both codecs, which means that Apple is the only vendor that will not be supporting Ogg. 'After an inordinate amount of discussions, both in public and privately, on the situation regarding codecs for and in HTML5, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that there is no suitable codec that all vendors are willing to implement and ship,' Hickson wrote. 'I have therefore removed the two subsections in the HTML5 spec in which codecs would have been required, and have instead left the matter undefined.'"

Since it seems pretty likely most web users couldn't care less about open vs. closed software, the answer seems obvious - go with h.264, the superior but closed codec. And do it now before Microsoft wades in and decides to muddy things up with more embrace/extend/extinguish shenanigans.

If the H.264 folk were smart they'd encourage browser vendors to support H.264 and license it to them for free. Why? Because that would ensure that H.264 becomes the dominate standard, and open the floodgates to users creating and uploading and playing H.264 video.

In the meantime, the H.264 group makes its money off the hardware guys, as now every computer, notebook, phone, and media device will need low-power dedicated H.264 hardware decoders.

and a poster child against software patents. It's *very* expensive for small players, it's incompatible with free media, the terms are almost impossible to comprehend (or at least you need several "IP" lawyers on staff), plus you aren't even assured that you won't be sued in Texas by some scum sucking, syphillitic pus-drinking, rotting corpse-devouring and worm-infested defecation-eating patent troll.

Scum Sucking Syphillitic Pus-Drinking Rotting Corpse Devouring Worm Infested Defecation Eaters' Anti-Defamation League on line two for you. They're upset at being compared to patent trolls or MPEG-LA, and are demanding you upgrade their status to "like child rapists."

Inferior standard. Judging from HTML4, by the time we could safely drop HTML5 support from our web browsers there'll be at least a dozen codecs that perform far, *far* better than H.264 does today so alleged superiority buys us very little, there'll still be a time where people interested in performance ignore the standard altogether. On the other hand, H.264's patent concerns will be with us for the next ~20 years, so Theora's advantage in ease of implementation will likely hold up for a much longer time.

It matters very little. If Microsoft and Apple fail to implement Theora, the fact that the standard calls for it will not matter (because it will not be practical as a universal fallback).

Mozilla can't license H.264 in a way that lets downstream packagers use it, so they don't want to put it in the standard either.

The previous/. story discussing the email Hickson sent out covered this stuff pretty well.

It isn't particularly hard to do things like put a flash fallback inside of a video tag, so people that want to use the standard but still have wide reach have lots of options (flash is the de facto way to play 'web' video today, so I don't think it is unreasonable to assume that this may continue).

I don't see why video will be any different once there is actually an accepted standard for it.

XviD isn't even a candidate in this, even though it has far wider support in both hardware and software than h.264. Why? "ohh, h.264 is much better". What makes you think the same won't happen with h.264 itself?

I've got no concerns over h.264 patents. The only people are those who have an agenda to push.

Wrong. Either you live outside the US, or you *should* worry about h.264 because MPEG certainly cares about you or anyone else who uses their patent without the requisite license.

Other than 'I can't just use their code without paying for it', I've yet to see any other reason not to use h264, please enlighten me, without resorting to FUD (i.e. copyright/patent bullshit).

Per-user licensing schemes are incompatible with most Free Software licenses. If you want to know more, ask a lawyer, I'm

Why the false dichotomy? The market had already voted long before W3C threw in the towel. Apple wasn't going to budge simply because its hardware platform was geared for h.264. It would render the hardware obsolete because now you have to run a software decoder for Theora, sapping the battery for processing that a dedicated, low power h.264 chip already does.

The problem with the 'open standard' is not necessarily its inferiority, per se, but its complete, utter lack of general market acceptance.

See, you're not looking towards the future. You need to be thinking what browsers people will be using. See, you keep thinking that everyone in the future will be sitting at home on a computer. You keep thinking that whatever browser people will be using, they'll have myriad choices on what device they will be using it on.

More and more people will be using mobile devices to do surfing, watch videos, etc. This comes back to hardware. What devices currently have a hardware decoder for Theora? How many i

I think Microsoft has lost the media wars, and they pretty well know it. (admittedly, just a guess) Expect their products to support H264 and AAC. The bigger fly in their ointment is probably improved web standards in general. They've been gearing up to fight Adobe (Silverlight vs. Flash) for the proprietary "rich web" market, and if HTML/CSS gets rich enough that we don't need a proprietary plugin, that might not end up being a market worth winning.

Oh it will still be worth winning. Even if HTML5 provides a "rich web experience," applet based approaches like Flash are already very well established and will not go away overnight. The desktop application market never vanished even after web apps became popular, so why assume that plugins and applets will not be worth fighting for?

The desktop application market never vanished even after web apps became popular, so why assume that plugins and applets will not be worth fighting for?

...Because desktop applications have some real strengths where Flash/Silverlight have none? For example, I can't exactly work on a web application when the internet is down. On the other hand, Flash seems to be enjoying hogging CPU cycles and crashing browsers, plus ActionScript isn't much easier to use than JavaScript/HTML/CSS. About the only "strength" Flash has is that it is visually based (its easy for an artist to pick up). There is not a single advantage that Flash or Silverlight really have if HTML,

Applets certainly do have strength. Applets can guarantee a consistent experience for your users (and you can always point the blame at third party runtimes if they cause a problem). Applets can be signed when users want a higher level of security. Applets add support for unusual codecs or features that are not envisioned by a standards committee (features that can be implemented by a web developer instead if a browser developer).

Flash/Silverlight... I can't exactly work on a web application when the internet is down

Yes, you can exactly do that. Or will, soon, if it's coded like that. Silverlight out of browser apps (and, I suppose, Adobe AIR apps) can run without network. Better yet, the coder can detect that there's no network, and keep data locally for a later sync.

There is not a single advantage that Flash or Silverlight really have if HTML, JavaScript and CSS can make application-like things in the browser?

Flash, to my recollection, was pretty much limited to ads and mediocre games before YouTube came along. If YouTube dumped flash, would it still be deemed necessary by the average user? Certainly iPhone users seem to be getting along without it...

Could we please get the game sites to dump flash as well? I don't mean those sites where you play 'lunchbreak" games, I am talking about the major sites set up to support a AAA commercial game. It is so fun when I get a new game and end up having to go to some out of the way place to find patches for it because the site set up by the game publisher makes you wade through 30 minutes plus of irritating as shit bling bling marketing BS just to get to the download section.

> I don't think Flash will go away overnight.I don't think it will go away at allNot when agencies can charge $100s for a 100K flash app that does something our html contractor could have done in 5 minutes and 2 lines of javascript he found online. (trivial apps like rotating images)

(Many) Agencies and individuals like to be "experts" on things that take special tools and knowledge so they can charge more.

LOTS of contractors can do html/css/basic javscript. Not as many can do flash and those who can do

The market has already decided. But it wasn't decided because of software, it was decided on hardware. Theora does not have a dedicated hardware decoder that hardware makers can pull off the shelf and incorporate into their devices. h.264 does. And, when you take into consideration the sheer number of devices that have that chip installed (virtually every 5th generation iPod and forward from Apple) it becomes very easy to tell that h.264 was going to be the winner.

If HTML5 had required Theora support, there'd be two or three months delay and then all the ASICs you could shake a stick at would be there.

It's not nearly that "trivial"...

These days it's not about simple decoders/ASIC chips, it's about complex SoCs that require a huge amount of development, testing, reference software/drivers, etc (not to mention manufacturing, marketing, sales/design wins, and application development/integration before it gets into a CE device...)

How can free software have a strategy for hardware at all? It's free software, not free hardware.

Again, this isn't just free software that licensing this will damage. End users will pay the price for licensing. It's not free; not even freeware.

And no, "free software" as a collective is not going in one direction. When the hell has any one type of software ever done that? Is "propietary software" going in one direction, too? Sure, parts have objectives - Gnome is going their pretty nifty Gnome Shell (which has no "me too" in it, I can assure you) and KDE is simply interested in polishing what they've got so far. The Linux kernel is working out filesystems and making things faster, all the while adding drivers. As a collective, these projects are making progress, but not in any distinct fashion. But then again, are all of the programs installed on the average Windows box also cohesively working as a team? I dare say not. You have a double standard for free software because you lump them together as if they should be a team, which is ludicrous at best.

The key here is that pretty much everyone else is either going to be neutral on the codecs or is going to be seeking the least encumbered. If Apple wants to cripple its products, then I say "Fuck them". Apple is rapidly taking Microsoft's place as being the most pernicious abuser of vendor lock-in ploys. I could care less whether those poor little iPhone and Safari fanbois can't watch online videos because Steve Jobs and his pack of well-trained corporate trolls somehow think that trying to ignore open standards is a worthwhile pursuit. There is enough penetration by players like Google and Mozilla now that I think giving a bunch of worthless assholes like Steve Jobs and Co. the one-fingered salute can probably fly. It ain't 1985 any more, and those retards at Apple will either wake up to it, or find, once more, they're taking good hardware and marginalizing it.

This same argument has been made for more than 15 years about every piece of opensource software. In the end, Microsoft gets to decide, if they even implement <video> at all. That's what I've been referring to by saying we've been down that road before. And guess what, Microsoft will probably go over to h.264, not Ogg Theora. And guess what, Firefox will have h.264 support when all is said and done.

Because otherwise you end up with the case that no one codec works in all browsers, so websites will have to support both formats by encoding all their videos twice. Instead, I suspect most website owners would just say "yeah....OR I could just keep doing it in flash and only worry about 1 format that can work in all browsers."

Except that most browsers don't include Flash support, and browsers do exist on platforms for which there is no Flash.Browsers don't just exist in desktop OS's anymore -- that's one of the big reasons for HTML5.

I'm guestimating roughly 1000% of those platforms that currently don't support flash, won't ever support HTML5.

These platforms will be replaced by updated/new platforms which may just as easily support Flash or HTML5.

The existance of these platforms is therefore of no influence to deciding between HT

Because people shouldn't have to be prompted to install codecs in order to view in-browser videos.

Yeah really! Every time I go to certain sites I get a prompt to install a new codec to see this hot video... And each time I do that my homepage changes to something not quite safe for work...
I wouldn't mind so much if they'd quit messin with my homepage... sheesh!

The whole point of the element is to allow content providers to choose one of the always supported formats and therefore know a-priori that it will work in the user's browser. A "choose one from this list" strategy, or creating a new plugin-hell for codecs doesn't accomplish this end.

I disagree - the video element explicitly allows for several source files, so the whole point is not to allow only for one codec, or to mandate several codecs which are supported by everyone. That would have been nice, but hasn't been possible. As it is the video element is now being treated more like the image one - different browsers will support different image formats, but most will support a few core ones.

The whole point of the video element is to allow pages to easily embed video files (as opposed to the messy complicated method using object elements). The video element allows for several encodings in order, so the process of choosing a codec is transparent to the user, so long as you can give them something they can play, and is painless for the provider, given that there are free options for converting to ogg.

So it's quite possible right now, in theory at least, to serve video that every browser on every device can play (h.264/ogg/flash) - here's an example [camendesign.com].

Life would be great if there was one clear unencumbered codec with no drawbacks, or at least a choice of a few (as there are for image formats), but there isn't one clear winner (ogg theora has definite disadvantages, the most important being lack of hardware support and quality issues). I think Apple should support Ogg, and see why Mozilla resist h.264 - there are strong arguments for both sides.

In the meantime the video element makes presenting video possible without a plugin with any sane browser (i.e. not IE), and is a step toward native browser support when people converge on a codec (or several) as they did with image formats.

Why not just un-encumber h.264? If it is so extremely valuable to the world as a whole, and so superior, then the government should just buy the damn thing and release it.

Or simply invalidate the patents behind it. Call it Eminent Domain or something. I mean, I know it would suck to lose your patents, but I'm sure whoever created it has recouped their expenses and even profited by now, since it's so damned important.

It seems like Apple has something against implementing any Xiph codec... FLAC and Vorbis support in iTunes is nonexistent, and even with the QuickTime plugin, iTunes still doesn't have proper tagging support. And now refusing to add Theora support in Safari?

Perhaps someone on the Xiph board did something to one of Apple's Media guys when they were kids or something?

Perhaps someone on the Xiph board did something to one of Apple's Media guys when they were kids or something?

Apple simply does not like free codecs because if customers are allowed to use them, then the corporation loses some control over the customers. That's the reason why people should refuse to buy anything from Apple and other companies with similar attitude towards their customers.

Apple uses open standards in their MobileMe /.Mac implementation. They also write standards-based server components, like CalDAV. Their platforms' preferred 3d library is OpenGL, another open standard.

Clearly they support many open standards, so it's not just about control over their customers.

It's cute that sites like Wikipedia insist on using formats like Theora, but the industry players have committed to H.264, and H.264 is going to be the standard

Don't tell us about it, tell to the CEOs of the Mozilla Foundation, the Wikimedia Foundation, Redhat, Opera and so on that they are not "industry players". Also don't forget to tell W3C that the real industry players changed their standard to include a patent ridden

Regardless of why they have some hatred for Xiph who cares what Apple's doing? Just specify Ogg. Apple will either lose market share as people switch to a browser that doesn't suck or they'll cave and use Ogg. If you can get 3 of them to agree I'd say that's pretty good. Are we just going to stop bothering to innovate because Apple won't give us its blessing? Let's just rename Apple to "Microsoft" and call it a day.

We (developers) are the ones that determine who wins the browser battles. We make the sites and we tell people what browser to use. FireFox didn't install itself on grandma's computer - that was us.

Apple will either lose market share as people switch to a browser that doesn't suck or they'll cave and use Ogg.

You're oversimplifying. This about more than just Web browsers. It is also about content services. When you don't have Google's Youtube on board with Ogg and you don't have iTunes on board with Ogg and it won't play on iPhones or iPods and you have little likelihood of that changing, specifying Ogg in the spec results in the spec not gaining widespread implementation and failing.

Are we just going to stop bothering to innovate because Apple won't give us its blessing?

Apple is one of the companies pushing HTML5 and already implements it in Safari. They aren't holding back progress so much as trying to push it in a different way than what Mozilla and Opera want.

We (developers) are the ones that determine who wins the browser battles.

I'd say the content providers have as much or more influence than browser developers. If the video element is implemented in a way content providers like iTunes and YouTube are not happy with, then it will be ignored by them and we''ll be stuck without any progress and a Web still locked into a fragmented mix and dominated by Flash video and Silverlight.

You misunderstand the nature of HTML5 standardization process. Unlike previous HTML iterations, which were designed by W3C committee which largely did not intersect with people who actually implemented it, HTML5 is a vendor-driven effort that had only recently came under the aegis of W3C (after the latter's XHTML 2.0 died a quick and painless death). Since it's vendor-driven, it's going to be exactly what the vendors can agree upon - no more, and no less.

We (developers) are the ones that determine who wins the browser battles. We make the sites and we tell people what browser to use.

Woah woah woah. That's a huge misconception that needs to be squashed right now: We, the content providers, do not tell the customer what browser to use; rather, the customer tells us what browser they're willing to use to view our content.

Why do you think so many "IE6 approved" sites still exist? Because those website's operators desperately want people to continue using IE6? No, they do it because a very large number of people are still using IE6 and are going to continue using IE6 regardless of what browser we mighty developers to try "force" others to use.

As someone else pointed out above, the problem with trying to hardball Apple into playing nice is that Apple will just sit and wait. When website developers go to create their sites and try to ensure cross-browser compatibility, their response to the problem will NOT be "Oh, Apple is just being douchebags. I'll just not bother supporting Safari until they support Theora." Instead, what they'll probably say is, "Hey, flash videos work in every browser. Why should I bother using this stupid VIDEO tag?"

It seems like Apple has something against implementing any Xiph codec... FLAC and Vorbis support in iTunes is nonexistent, and even with the QuickTime plugin, iTunes still doesn't have proper tagging support. And now refusing to add Theora support in Safari?

No need for conspiracy theories. Theora doesn't solve any problems for Apple.

Theora won't work in iPods, iPhones, or AppleTV.

And Theora is less efficient than even H.264 baseline, and so would raise their (presumably quite substantial) bandwidth costs for delivering video content.

Just watch. Once IE's market share hits 50%, suddenly Microsoft will start playing ball. The search revenue from all the IE users who don't bother to change the default search is too nice to simply give up.

Honestly, I think it is possible to overestimate the power of Microsoft's vendor lock-in. If they don't get in gear and really compete in the browser market, it's only a matter of time before it bites them in the ass. They've already lost of decent chunk of the market to these other browsers.

If these browsers get to the point where they're all offering a clearly superior experience on the web, and Microsoft is still dragging their feet, they will eventually become irrelevant themselves.

If these browsers get to the point where they're all offering a clearly superior experience on the web, and Microsoft is still dragging their feet, they will eventually become irrelevant themselves.

Exactly. Which is precisely why Microsoft isn't doing anything, and probably won't. Apple's NIH syndrome and Google's bandwidth interests will prevent them from accepting Theora, Mozilla's legal and Opera's monetary problems with H.264 prevent them from accepting it in turn, and neither faction holds enough leverage over the web to 'win' here without Microsoft's support.

End result? no single codec is picked as the standard, web developers ignore the video tag and continue relying on Flash, the status quo is

Right, while convenient, that doesn't strike me as a very comprehensive list of "major browser vendors".

Good point. Let me fix that: "Hickson outlined the positions of each major browser vendor that is likely to get off their ass and release something relevant to this issue within the decade". Does that about cover it?

They could have simply specified that a browser must support ONE of the two options, h.264 or Theora. This would have at least provided a reference to websites, such that they can guarantee that they need support no more than two codecs. Without a standard, they can't necessarily guarantee that a browser will support either. A third party browser may come by and decide to implement nothing but MJPEG since it isn't specified.

I mean, there are legitimate concerns in both camps. Theora's hardware support is non-existent, and h.264 has expensive licensing fees. So why not allow browser manufactuerers to pick the one that best suits their position, rather than leaving it undefined entirely?

A guarantee of at least one of two being supported is better than no guarantee at all.

HTML doesn't specify what image format must be supported (PNG, GIF, JPG, etc); why is video any different? If HTML had specified GIF explicitly up-front, we'd all be in trouble when UniSys became dicks about it.

Let the market decide. If h.264 succeeds despite the extra cost, it means folks found enough value to justify the cost. If DivX or VC1 come out of nowhere to take over the web we won't be left with an out-dated standard. If a sleeper patent hits Theora hard we'll be glad we didn't lock ourselves down.

That's a good point, but the bandwidth and storage requirements of images pale in comparison to video. I've had to make sites using GIF for IE6 and PNG for browsers that don't suck (to take advantage of the alpha channel). It was a PITA, but the extra storage requirements were not that big a deal. Doing the same with video would be much more of a problem, even with today's cheap storage.

you forgot this one, if a sleeper patent hits h.264, DivX, VC1, or any of the codecs then in every case it will have to be dealt with. Sorry, I just don't buy the bit about only one codec, the open source one, being subject to patent issues.

Huh? Theora would have hardware support fired up within three blinks of its ratification as part of HTML5 and the release of browsers supporting it. For many (most? all?) instances, such "hardware" support is often implemented on DSP core(s), not a dedicated ASIC just for a specific codec, making the update just a matter of new firmware for existing systems.

Allowing a "pick one" scenario means that third-party content providers have no freaking clue what format they can present their data in for their use

It's definitely a better option, but there is a catch - it means that content providers who want to reach the widest possible audience will need to encode video in H.264. And that means that they will need H.264 encoders, which are by definition non-free (since license fees must be payed for those).

Now consider something like Wikipedia. Since videos are uploaded by the users, it would effectively require all of them to have licensed H.264 codecs to contribute - which is an unacceptable burden for a Free enc

The best reason I have seen so far as to why Apple/Google favor H.264 is because their current products have H.264 hardware encoders in them. Switching to ogg/theora would hit battery life hard in these devices since it would have to be done in software. While I agree that its a selfish reason, its a reason better then "cause we want it".
I would really like to see Theora succeed though, an open standard for web would be a beautiful thing

Really? Why does the HTML5 spec care what codecs are used? Why doesn't it just provide a way to specify which codec the author used to encode the media file, and let the browser prompt the user to get it if needed?

Indeed, as was done for pictures using the tag. HTML didn't specify a particular file format. You could use.bmp,.ico,.gif,.jpg, etc. Why on Earth would you WANT to standardize on a particular file format and lose that flexibility? Better file formats will show up over time and certainly you'd like to be able to use tem. The good formats will stick and become de facto standards. The not so good formats will fall by the wayside.

Because you end up with the craptastic situation like IE6 where they sort of support PNG but not really because they don't support transparency. If there isn't universal browser support for a format it might as well not even exist / be an option because you can't use it. If you have to code for IE6 you can't use transparent PNGs can you? So what difference does it make that you can "use any format?"

If we go this route with video what options are left? Stick with flash? Encode everything in two different codecs and *hope* that the browsers all support one of the two? I don't know about you but I think those options suck.

Img-tag doesn't specify which image formats you must or must not use so I really don't understand why video-tag should be any different. Video-tag could just instruct the browser that "put the video in here and fetch stream from here or if user has no ability to play the video display whatever is inside the alt-attribute".

So when browser sees video-tag it renders it by using which ever video plugin or built-in mechanism is in use, be it Flash, Silverlight, Windows Media Player or whatever. Then it is up to

The huge headache everyone wants to avoid is content providers having to code around, and store duplicate copies of video, to cater to all the browsers.

This is before you get into all the bullshit about codecs that are really rootkits and the like. You do not want your browser saying, "I cannot cope with the computationally intensive task to render this video without 'magic software' from goatse.cx".

The fear is that the "good format" in this case will be H.264, and once it will stick and become de facto standard, we'll have the same mess as with GIF all over again - since FOSS browsers won't be able to support it legally (at least in U.S.), nor free content creation/editing tools.

At present, any time I'm surfing the Web and I get a popup telling me "You need to install 'X' to view this video", I assume it's a virus. I'd actually prefer to keep it that way... it's simple, at least.

Adds support for Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora to QuickTime (which is used for nearly all media playback on OSX). Easy to install (but could be made easier easily - such as making into a.pkg), and makes Safari 4 work with <video> and Theora.

Also, can we please stop whining about this in relation to the HTML5 spec? HTML has never specified file formats for media/objects (<img>, <object>) and it should *not* start now.

I'm not sure why we can't implement support for both or even more codecs. Can anyone tell me why this isn't possible?

The way I figure it, if both is supported, and agreement to assist in implementing support for the other can be reached and as long as the spec is documented, adding the functionality to the browsers should be trivial to any group capable of creating and maintaining a modern browser. We could actually implement a plug in scheme that allows functionality to be snapped in on the fly.

- Ogg requires ZERO licensing costs, which is very important to the Open Source community who want to create free products that do not produce revenue for the creator.- Ogg is not currently hardware accelerated by any mainstream hardware (encode or decode) and therefore is not ideal for current generation netbooks or other low powered devices.- Ogg does not produce quite the same quality as the patent encumbered options at low bitrates

It works on older browsers too, falling back on built in players or even flash if it has to. You simply provide it one.mp4, and one.ogg file and it uses which is best.

Don't let this bickering stop everyone from moving to the video tag as soon as possible, which may then see further solution on a final standard.

I have to say though, the hardware support aspect to me makes h.264 support a must. I also think Apple should support ogg too, but Mozilla really needs to support this de-facto standard for video (it's not just Apple using this in hardware).

I'm asking the users. Are there any? I know many iPods have shipped, but what are you people doing with them? You're watching video on them? Really?

No, really: who the fuck is watching movies on a 3 inch screen? And if that's you, are you actually happy with it? When you want to watch some video, your first instinct is to reach for your battery-powered thingie?

This obscure corner case is what is going to hold video back for everyone (including the desktop users and PVR users) for 20 years, until the patents expire?!

What interests me is the fact that in these discussions about Theora being an old and antiquated codec, nobody seems to know about Dirac [diracvideo.org], which is a modern video codec quite comparable to H.264 developed by the BBC.

Dirac is specifically designed to be free in the sense we love, and they have specifically checked to make sure it doesn't violate any patents, etc.

It is supported in recent versions of FFMPEG, and since VLC 0.9.2. Support for it is maturing quite fast, and I don't understand why Mozilla didn't include support for it in their HTML5 video implementation.

Since Opera implements <video> with GStreamer, it should already support Dirac if you have the support installed.

It would be nice if Apple would go ahead and support OGG Vorbis and OGG Theora. Can any lawyerly folk give an idea of the worst possible scenario here? Someone steps forward claiming to have patented something in OGG, and Apple is forced to either strip support or pay a licensing fee?

On the other hand, their method of supporting the video tag seems somewhat reasonable. It looks like any format that Quicktime supports, Safari will support in the "video" tag. It's not hard to go download the OGG Theora c

Microsoft's blessing was a must when they had 95% market share. Right now they have no more than 70% and it is steadily declining - by the time HTML5 is available, they might not matter any more. Moreover the majority of their market share is just uninformed. All it takes now is one really big "killer site" like Youtube not supporting IE, and their share will plummet into the low 20s.

Since it is under a BSD style license it doesn't require either the GPL of the LGPL code so your whole argument disappears into a void of stupidity.

And yes they published the spec of the format and yes it is up to date. And yes it isn't a standard from whatever standards body you like this week which in practice means you don't have to pay for it.

Again you fail at the simplest of things. Where would one expect to find a specification for a free format? Probably under "Documentation", right? And what would you know it is in fact there: http://www.theora.org/doc/ [theora.org]. But even if there weren't that wouldn't even matter, since there is a BSD licensed reference implementation of the decoder which would do well enough as a specification.

Now as for that hardware thing -- no, Theora does not and probably will never have hardware decoding support and that is